Here is a guide to installing Transmission (a bittorrent client) on a Linux server (Ubuntu 12.10). This was my experience that I gained from a guide located here. In fact, most of this guide is take verbatim from there, since I had no problems following their instructions.

Installing transmission-daemon

Type the following command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install transmission-daemon

Next we need to create two folders where the torrent files be downloaded and a folder for uncompleted torrents as below.

mkdir ~/transmission
mkdir ~/transmission/completed ~/transmission/incomplete

Note: “~/” is your home folder, mine is /home/brandon

As transmission-daemon runs by the user ‘debian-transmission‘ we need to give full access to that user and also allow myself to have full access to the folders.

To change ownership of the directories to the debian-transmission user and it’s group type the following.

sudo chown debian-transmission:debian-transmission ~/transmission/completed 
sudo chown debian-transmission:debian-transmission ~/transmission/incomplete

Now add current user account to debian-transmission group.

sudo usermod -a -G debian-transmission brandon

Change permission of the directory to allow only owner and group to access it.

sudo chmod 770 ~/transmission/*

Open the transmission-daemon configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Edit the following lines:

“download-dir”: “/home/irfad/transmission/completed”, 
“incomplete-dir”: “/home/irfad/transmission/incomplete”, 
“rpc-authentication-required”: true, #Authentication is enabled by default
“rpc-password”: “yourpasswordhere”, #Set a password for username
“rpc-port”: 9091, 
“rpc-username”: “yourusernamehere”, #Default username
“rpc-whitelist”: “127.0.0.1,*.*.*.*”, #Allow access from anywhere

Save the configuration file and reload the daemon

sudo service transmission-daemon reload

Now simply type the address in the web browser and login with username and password that you set in the config file.

http://<your ip or domain name here>:9091

Maybe I’ll work with another bittorrent client in the future. I currently have uTorrent installed on my Windows server, and I’m using the WebUI feature.